Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945

Senuma Kayo was born in 1875 in Gunma, where her father ran a seed nursery; her birth name was Yamada Ikuko. She was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church; upon her mother Yoka’s death in 1883, burial in the family plot was prohibited on account of her Christianity. Ikuko went to a church-affiliated girls’ school in Tokyo, graduating in 1892 and attempting a career as a writer while teaching at her alma mater.

Given books in Russian by Archbishop Nicholas, whom she had admired since childhood, Ikuko studied the language with Ivan Senuma Kakusaburo, the head of the Orthodox St. Nikolai Cathedral seminary (he had run away from home at sixteen to go into the church and attended seminary in Kiev), and married him in 1897; they were to have six children. After her marriage he introduced her to the writer Ozaki Koyo, who took her on as a disciple (his first female one) and gave her the pen name Kayo, which shares a character with his own pen name.

She became a well-known Russian translator, as the first Japanese woman to translate directly from the Russian. Her translations included works by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, as well as a joint attempt at Anna Karenina with her husband (who was among Tolstoy’s correspondents, although their religious beliefs clashed). Her style is said to have valued elegance in Japanese writing over absolute faithfulness to the source text.

In 1909, frustrated by being shut up in the house, Kayo set off on a trip to Russia and sent back a series of newspaper articles about her visit to Vladivostok. In 1911 she traveled there again, accompanied only by her baby daughter Fumiko if that’s how you read it; I never saw the name 文代子 in my life. Fuyoko? Ayoko?, traveling as far as St. Petersburg on the Siberian Railway. (There was gossip at the time that Fumiko was the daughter of a Russian exchange student ten years Kayo’s junior.) In St. Petersburg she worked as a shop clerk and a Japanese instructor.

Upon her return to Japan in 1912, she became a member of Hiratsuka Raicho’s feminist magazine Seito [Bluestocking], which published her translations of Chekhov (whom she enjoyed for his humor among other reasons) before they were released in book form. She died in 1915 from complications of a seventh pregnancy.

Tsuneko Gauntlett was born in 1873 in Aichi; her birth name was Yamada Tsune. Her parents Kenzo and Hisa were the children of a doctor and a horsemaster respectively, but had little luck in their own career trying to do business in Tokyo. For a while Tsune was fostered out to an aunt married to a doctor working with Hansen’s disease; she continued to seek advice and support from her aunt and uncle throughout her youth.

At age six she entered the Sakurai Girls’ School. When its first principal, Sakurai Chika, resigned her post in favor of Yajima Kajiko, Tsuneko was prepared to rebel; eventually, however, she became Kajiko’s devoted supporter and remained so all their lives. In 1890 she went to teach English at the Kyoai Girls’ School in Gunma north of Tokyo; among her students there was Okubo (Kubushiro) Ochimi, Kajiko’s niece, who was later to be her colleague in the Women’s Suffrage Association.
It was through the introduction of a British colleague that she met Edward Gauntlett, a missionary and fellow English teacher. He fell first; she was reluctant to accept his proposal for a long time, not sure she was attracted to him and also cognizant of the trouble inherent in marrying a foreigner. He persevered, however, and on the advice of her aunt and uncle as well as Kajiko, they were married in 1898 (Tsuneko’s mother, fiercely opposed, was persuaded to come to the wedding but sat sulking the whole time). Gauntlett was a respectable young Englishman with an extra dose of intellectual curiosity which had brought him to Japan. They shared not only a religion but also an interest in music; Gauntlett was an amateur organist, and Tsuneko had studied the organ and had the family musical ability (her brother became the noted composer Yamada Kôsçak ).

They were married in a Tokyo church. When they went to register their marriage at the local ward office, however, they were turned away: “there is no precedent for such a thing [as international marriage].” At the time, Japanese women taking up with foreign men were still seen as Madame Butterflies at best. Tsuneko applied to every relevant Ministry she could think of to find out the correct procedure, and was told only that nobody had ever done such a thing before, so nobody knew how to do it. In the end, she “ran away” in order to abandon her Japanese citizenship, applying at the same time for British citizenship, which she was eventually granted via a letter from Queen Victoria.

In 1901 the Gauntletts moved to Okayama (where a friendly Zen priest let them set up a pipe organ in the middle of his temple) to teach at high schools there. It was at this point that Tsuneko began to wear Western clothing, and to make Western clothes for her children likewise. Tsuneko’s brother joined them in Okayama for a while, receiving his early training in music from his brother-in-law (who also joined him in introducing table tennis to Japan there). The Gauntletts eventually moved to Kanazawa and then to Yamaguchi before returning to Tokyo in 1916, having gone through various health problems and had six children.

Tsuneko shifted her focus to social activism, working with Yajima Kajiko in the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs (Japan’s branch of the WCTU) for temperance and peace and against prostitution. She traveled overseas numerous times to speak at conferences on these issues. In 1920 she accompanied Kajiko to the West, taking care of her daily needs as well as tutoring her in English, acting as interpreter, and mending her aged kimono when it gave way unexpectedly during a party. She took the chance to travel to her husband’s hometown while in England, where his brothers and stepmother (who was relieved to find that her Japanese daughter-in-law was human and not a monster out of distorted paintings) received her warmly. In 1937 she was named president of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association.

During the war, Tsuneko and Ted remained in Japan but kept to themselves, effectively under house arrest under the eye of the thought police as one-time citizens of a hostile country, although both had become Japanese nationals by this point (their oldest son Owen sued the Japanese government after the war for forcing him to take Japanese citizenship); they were fortunate enough to survive and not to be imprisoned, however. In 1946 Tsuneko became head of the Women’s Association for Reforming Customs. She died in 1953 at the age of eighty, followed three years later by her husband. Of their six children, two settled in Britain while four remained in Japan; all six worked as teachers at some point.

Sources
Nakae, Shimamoto
https://www.japanjournals.com/feature/72-culture/survivor4/1085-2011-03-21-12-00-10-9917180.html?limit=1 (Japanese) Article with various pictures (click through from pages 1 to 7)

Noguchi Yuka was born in 1866 in Himeji west of Kobe to Noguchi Iyashi, a mine administrator, and his wife Kuri. She began studying writing and English from preschool days, also getting to know the families of the French mining technicians her father worked with, and sampling foods then unknown in Japan, such as strawberry milk (?) and chocolate. In 1885, she entered the Tokyo Girls’ Normal School (present-day Ochanomizu University), where the post-Restoration westernization was in full swing; she was somewhat shocked to see students dancing with male teachers at a school dance (perhaps in imitation of the Rokumeikan style).

Yuka’s father died in 1886 and her mother two years later; she became a Christian the same year. Graduating high in her class in 1890, she was immediately employed at the Normal School’s affiliated kindergarten. In 1894 she was hired by the newly established kindergarten at the School for Noble Girls. There she worked with and became close to Morishima Miné, who had studied early childhood education for the poor in America and whose experience there was a major influence on Yuka as well. Observing the children of the poor on her way to work with the children of peers, Yuka became determined to work toward their education. She and Miné held a charity concert which produced enough seed money to allow them to open Futaba Kindergarten in 1900.

Yuka held down two jobs for the next quarter-century, working at the School for Noble Girls while also running Futaba, until devoting herself to the latter in 1922. Futaba, run on Froebelian lines, was specifically intended as a school for children from poor families; it also implemented an elementary school program for children not enrolled in regular school (converted in 1922 to an after-school care program when the city took over the elementary school project), a home for single mothers and their children, and a night clinic for working parents.

She retired in 1935, leaving all responsibility for Futaba in the hands of Tokunaga Yuki, who had been involved with the school since encountering it as a fifteen-year-old in 1902. From 1942 to 1947, she lectured on Christianity to Empress Nagako, a former student of hers at the School for Noble Girls.
Yuka died in 1950 at the age of eighty-four; she and Tokunaga Yuki were buried in the same grave.

*Tagging this post with “lgbtq interest” is pure speculation; I would need quite a bit of library research to find out whether Yuka’s working partnerships with Morishima Miné and Tokunaga Yuki could fall under that heading, and even then nothing might come to light. But it seemed to me worth drawing attention to the possibility.

Sources
Nakae
https://childmam.blog/2022/01/19/yuka-noguti/ (Japanese) Short article with photos of Yuka and Miné as well as the current Futaba Kindergarten

Mori Hiroko was born in 1864 in Kyoto, the fifth daughter of Iwakura Tomomi, the leader of the Iwakura Mission, Japan’s post-Restoration attempt to learn more about the West. Her birth name was Tsuneko. She spent ages six and seven fostered out to a farming family, a custom of the nobility intended to offer young children better health than the enclosed atmospheres of the old court could confer. It was just at this time that her father moved the family to Tokyo and left on his Mission (escorting Tsuda Ume and company to the United States, among other tasks). He returned two years later.
In 1881 she married Count Arima Yoritsumu (both were not yet out of their teens), giving birth to a daughter, Teiko, in 1883 and a son, Yoriyasu, in 1884. In 1885 she was divorced and returned to her birth family.

In 1886, she married Mori Arinori, then the Minister of Education. “I was twenty-three and he had just turned forty. … He visited me many times before the marriage was decided, surprising me with his attitude; I had not known there could be such a man. He told me about himself in great detail and persisted in knowing how I felt about what I heard, so that when we were alone together I felt for the first time that his heart was open to me. My father was gone by that time, and my mother’s warning to me [based on her own experience] was that marrying a government minister would not be all wine and roses, that I must prepare myself for any number of troubles to come.”

Mori told her he would leave the family finances to her, which awed Hiroko, who had been given no responsibility in her previous marriage. “I didn’t know a thing at first, I relied on the butler for everything, I resolved at least to begin by learning how to handle figures. When I had worked out the household accounts at the end of the month, I asked [Mori] to look over my calculations, and he said he needn’t bother, he was leaving it all to me. He handed over his salary envelope to me unopened. That was how I learned how much a government minister earned every month: five hundred yen.” They dined on Western food (Kyoto-born Hiroko secretly longed for o-chazuke, but her husband instructed the cook not to permit her to eat it, as he felt Western food was healthier) and played bezique in the evenings.

Because Mori’s first wife’s name had also been Tsuneko, she changed her name to Hiroko. Having left her own children with the Arima family, she found herself stepmother to Mori’s sons Kiyoshi and Suguru, children of another divorced wife, then eleven and nine. “They were good children, clever, they never gave me a hard time. Suguru could be quite naughty, but he was adorable.”

In 1888 she gave birth to a son, Akira. The following year Mori was assassinated, on the day set aside to celebrate the new Meiji Constitution: a young ultranationalist, protesting Mori’s supposed failures of protocol on a visit to Ise Shrine, stabbed him on his own doorstop more or less in front of his wife’s eyes.

In 1904, Hiroko and her stepson Suguru and son Akira became Christians. She died in 1943, briefly reunited before her death with her Arima children and grandchildren as well.

Sources
Shimamoto
http://easthall.blog.jp/archives/16127257.html (Japanese) Photographs of Mori Arinori, both his wives (in order), and their descendants

Wakamatsu Shizuko was born in 1864 in Aizu, originally named Matsukawa Kashi, to a samurai family on the wrong side of the Meiji Restoration fighting. Like Niijima Yae and Oyama Sutematsu, she experienced the horrific siege of Aizu-Wakamatsu as a child. She was six when her mother died, leaving her alone in a DP camp (her father was fighting in Hokkaido, with Enomoto Tatsu’s husband Takeaki) until she was adopted by Okawa Jinbei, a Yokohama silk merchant (who wanted a child as company for his wife O-Roku, formerly an Aizu prostitute whose freedom Okawa had purchased).

The Okawas, and later Kashi’s birth father upon his return, sent her to Miss Kidder’s School for Girls, later Ferris Seminary, a boarding school run by missionaries. There Kashi was baptized in 1877 and became the school’s first graduate in 1882, giving a speech in English at the ceremony. One of her teachers described her as possessed of “[a] nervous temperament, yet having a masterly self-control that lent a quiet dignity to all her movements. She possessed quick mental activity and vivid emotions, without…offensive forwardness.”

She immediately became a teacher at her alma mater, running English literature and drama clubs alongside her classes and acting as an interpreter when needed. In 1886 she became engaged to Serata Tasuku, a naval officer who possessed all the virtues as far as she and the school were concerned (Christian, cosmopolitan, fluent in English, and very handsome). However, Kashi herself broke off the engagement for reasons that are not clear but may have had to do with her already poor health or with her sense that Serata was out of her star, or with a different man met in a different context.

Likewise in 1886, Kashi began to write essays and short stories for the magazine Jogaku Zasshi (Women’s Education). From this point on, she began to use “Wakamatsu Shizu” or “Shizuko” as a pen name. “Wakamatsu” came from her hometown; “Shizu,” written unusually with the character for “peasant” or “lowly,” may have come from a sense of herself as God’s servant.

Jogaku Zasshi was published by the Christian educator Iwamoto Yoshiharu, whose work Shizuko admired; she transformed his (Japanese) biography of Kimura Toko, the recently deceased founder of the Meiji Girls’ School, into a lengthy English poem. Shizuko and Iwamoto married in 1889. She wrote an English poem called “The Bridal Veil” to mark the occasion, which he published in the magazine thereafter. “…Look close on my heart, see the worst of its shining./It’s not yours to-day for the yesterday’s winning./The past is not mine. I am too proud to borrow./You must grow to new heights if I love you tomorrow./We’re married! O, pray that our love do not fail!/I have wings flattened down, and hid under my veil,/They are subtle as light, you can undo them,/And swift in their flight, you can never pursue them./And spite of all clasping, and spite of all bands,/I can slip like a shadow, a dream, from your hands./…”

She left her teaching job not long after, feeling unable to do it justice due to her failing health. As a translator, she produced Japanese versions of Longfellow, Tennyson, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (which became a bestseller in translation) and Sara Crewe, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others of the time, focusing particularly on children’s literature; some of the lesser-known works, such as those of Adelaide Anne Procter, she rewrote to provide a Japanese setting more familiar to her readers. Her translations were extremely punctilious even when freer in nature, going through multiple drafts. She remarked that “[s]truggling to come up with the most appropriate word in translation is an agonizing process. But once you have found it the joyful satisfaction you feel is like to that of a woman who, rummaging through her dresser drawers, at last comes upon the very kimono collar whose design suits her perfectly.” Her translations were both very popular and critically acclaimed, even by the stringent standards of the male translators of the time.

Shizuko also wrote numerous short stories of her own, focusing on the status of women and their experiences of family life and marriage. In both her translations and her original work, she was a pioneer of genbun itchi, the practice of using a written style which approximated speech rather than an abstracted literary dialect. Somewhere in there, even as her health continued to decline, she also found the time to bear children in 1890, 1891, and 1893 (Kiyoko, Masahito, and Tamiko). From 1894 on she published a series of English essays on social and religious issues in The Japan Evangelist. In 1895, pregnant with a fourth child, she died.

Sources
Ishii, Nakae
Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000)

Yamashita Rin was born in 1857 in present-day Ibaraki. Her father was a minor samurai reduced to poverty in the runup to the Meiji Restoration, and the family struggled even more after his death when she was seven. When she was old enough to marry, it was suggested that she wed a local farmer, since that would at least mean enough to eat. Rin, however, had been determined from childhood to study art. In 1872, she ran away to Tokyo, walking all the way, only to be summarily returned home by the relatives she found to stay with. Impressed by her determination, her mother permitted her to return to Tokyo the following year.

There she worked as a maid in the house of the woodblock artist Toyohara Kunichika, living in and copying his paintings as a method of study. Developing an interest in the newly discovered Western painting styles as well, she went to study with the cutting-edge Western-style yōga painter Nakamaru Seijuro. When the (unusually, coeducational) Technical Fine Arts School opened in 1876, employing a number of Italian teachers, she enrolled in the painting department (with fees paid by the former domain lord of her native region) and studied Western-style painting with Antonio Fontanesi.

In 1880 she was given the opportunity to study in Russia, replacing her classmate Varvara Yamamuro Masako; the Russian Orthodox missionary Father Nikolai had seen and liked Masako’s paintings and offered her the spot, but Masako had unthoughtfully gotten married instead, so Rin was selected in her place. Upon Masako’s introduction, she was also baptized by Father Nikolai, choosing Irina as her Russian name. She left Japan on a French ship at the end of 1880 and traveled for fifty days via Hong Kong, Singapore, the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, and the Bosporus to arrive in the Black Sea. From the port of Odessa she took the train to Moscow and then [St.] Petersburg, where she studied at the Novodevichy Convent and was taught to paint Russian Orthodox icons. Frustrated by their limitations, she obtained permission to visit the Hermitage Museum as well—but only for a scant three months, as the Convent disapproved of the Italians. The artistic limitations placed on her led to a depression; the diaries she initially kept in detail featured complaints like “icons are monster pictures, I want to paint like Raphael” and then petered out, and she cut her five-year visit down to three years, returning to Japan in 1883.

Though initially disposed to leave the church, she soon returned. Given an atelier in the Orthodox cathedral’s Tokyo seminary for women, she began, after some time, to paint icons and teach Russian there. She remained lifelong friends with Father Nikolai, who encouraged her to import some of the Italianate art style she preferred into her icon work. Her paintings number over 300, not all signed. By 1918, her vision was declining due to cataracts; in addition, the Russian Revolution had reduced the strength of the Orthodox church in Japan. She returned to her hometown, where she lived as a farmer and enjoyed her daily dose of sake. She died in 1939 at the age of 83.

Sources
Nakae
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/bg900319/ (English) Article quoting the author of a novel based on Rin’s life
https://catalog.obitel-minsk.com/blog/2020/11/irina-yamashita-the-first-japanese-icon-painter (English) Very religious site! which does provide a lot of details and also numerous reproductions of Rin’s works
https://ebiaki.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/%E5%B1%B1%E4%B8%8B%E3%82%8A%E3%82%93/ (Japanese) Article discussing some of Rin’s inner struggles, with photographs of her hometown

Ogino Ginko was born in 1851 in present-day Saitama Prefecture, the daughter of a prosperous farmer: a small, tanned, clever child with beautiful eyes and a strong will. At eighteen [or sixteen] she married Inamura Kan’ichiro, headman of a nearby village; their happy (?) marriage ended in divorce (on his part yet) when Ginko discovered that he had infected her with gonorrhea, leaving her unable to bear children. She checked herself into the Juntendo Hospital in Tokyo for treatment, finding it humiliating that the doctors attending to her private parts were all men. Her own discomfort and that of the other women patients there marked the beginning of her determination, furthered by the atmosphere of novelty surrounding the 1868 Meiji Reformation, to become a doctor herself.

In better health after a year of treatment, she returned home and began to study traditional Chinese medicine, returning to Tokyo for serious study in 1873 at age 23 (among the people she consulted for advice at this point was the artist Okuhara Seiko, an acquaintance of her ex-husband’s family). She first apprenticed herself to the traditional physician and scholar Inoue Yorikuni; although she wore men’s clothing for her lessons, it was not long before the recently widowed Inoue made a pass at her, which ended her apprenticeship. [Some texts do not mention this disagreeable episode at all, while at least one site describes her as Inoue’s second wife.] She fled to Kofu in Yamanashi Prefecture to teach at Naito Masuko’s school for small girls. In 1875 she returned to Tokyo and entered the newly established Tokyo Women’s Normal School (later Ochanomizu Women’s University), and after graduating at the top of her class was able to enter the Kojuin Medical School, which normally did not admit women, through an introduction from various eminent figures, including Shimoda Utako.

However, no matter how many times she submitted her application for the exam required to open a practice, it was rejected: “such a thing is without precedent.” Around this time she wrote a miserable article in Jogaku Zasshi, a magazine for women’s edification: “…The weather is cold, frost smothers the roof tiles, but who will listen to me protest that my dress is too thin?” and other poetic images expressing her frustration in the language of the highly educated. She even considered studying overseas, but hesitated because of the huge expenses involved.

At length Ginko discovered the Ryonogige, an 8th-century book of imperial edicts which mentioned women doctors, seven clever girls from good families who studied to serve the Imperial Family as physicians. This tradition stood up in her favor, but it was not until September 1884 that Ginko’s efforts finally opened the examination to women; she took the exam the following year and passed with flying colors, becoming at age 35 the first official woman doctor in modern Japan. She opened a clinic in central Tokyo, which became so popular it outgrew its first premises, and also served as physician and instructor at the Meiji Girls’ School under Iwamoto Yoshiharu.

From an interview with the novelist Shimizu Shikin at this time, sometime in the late 1880s: “When I first opened my clinic, there were absolutely no women doctors, so with other colleagues and when making house calls, I felt as if I were being tested every time. I still get curious looks from maids and so on during house calls. … It’s in gynecology and pediatrics that women doctors are most needed. … [Is being a doctor a suitable job for a woman?] Well, I’m single so I have no household issues, but it must be difficult for a woman doctor with a husband. She has to go out in the middle of the night if a patient summons her, and when her husband comes home wanting his wife’s comfort, she may be seeing to an emergency patient. If there’s an epidemic, she has to leave her tired husband and her children both and go out to do her work.”

In 1890, having begun to attend a nearby church, she met and fell in love with the twenty-six-year-old seminary student Shikata Yukiyoshi, a Christian activist with whose ideals she could empathize (she had also worked with the Japan Christian Women’s Association for Reforming Customs (WCTU), led by Yajima Kajiko, in its anti-prostitution activities). They married and moved to Hokkaido to “start a new utopia,” calling it Immanuel Village. Real life did not cooperate, however; the shortage of patients in their small town kept them poor, and after some time, as Shikata wanted to return to school, they considered separation.

He died in 1905. Ginko returned to Tokyo and reopened her clinic in 1909, living with her widowed older sister and dying of a stroke in 1913 at age 63.

Sources
Nakae, Mori 1996, Shimamoto
https://www.pastmedicalhistory.co.uk/ogino-ginko-japans-first-female-doctor/ (English) Decent summary with a nice color picture of the young Ginko
https://www.town.setana.lg.jp/ogino/ (Japanese) Detailed information on the site of the town where Ginko lived in Hokkaido
https://www.pref.saitama.lg.jp/documents/190553/ginkomanga2.pdf (Japanese) Adorable manga biography
Note: The English Wikipedia entry on Ginko is remarkably garbled and unreliable, including the line “Afterward, she entered Tokyo Women’s Normal School (present-day Ochanomizu University), which was at that time a private medical academy with an all-male student body.” Do these people think?

Yajima Kajiko was born in 1833, the sixth daughter of the mayor of her village, in what is now Mashiki Town, Kumamoto. As the latest of a long string of girls, no one got around to naming her until her oldest sister selected “Katsu.” She early on acquired vicarious experience of the world through her sisters, including Tsuseko, who was married to the much older Confucianist Yokoi Shonan as a second wife (or, for all intents and purposes, a concubine) and treated badly, as well as Hisako, who was temporarily divorced from her husband for bearing him only girls, taken back only when her son Iichiro (later to be the writer Tokutomi Soho) was born.

Katsu married Yokoi’s disciple, the samurai Hayashi Shichiro, when she was twenty-six. Handsome but a drunkard, he had two or possibly three children already, to which she added a son and two daughters. Ten years later, tired of his bad behavior, she left him and returned to her family home. (Accounts of what she did with her children differ; she may have left them with him, she may have taken them with her, she may have taken only the youngest daughter. Her son is said to have invited her to come and live with him in Tokyo many years later.) When he sent a messenger to demand her return, she cut off her hair at the roots and sent it to him as her response.

In 1872, four years later, she went up to Tokyo alone to see her oldest brother through an illness. On the way there, aged 40, she changed her name from Katsuko to the much more unusual Kajiko (“rudder”), inspired by the way little rudders could move big ships. After her brother’s recovery, she qualified as a schoolteacher and began teaching at Shiba Sakuragawa Elementary School. At some point during this time she had a child in secret with Suzuki Yosuke, a married man who was either her brother’s secretary or her eye doctor (accounts differ). Her new daughter Taeko was sent to live with a farming family and much later “adopted” back into Kajiko’s household (shades of Dorothy L. Sayers).

In 1878 she became a teacher at Shin-Sakae Girls’ School, a Presbyterian mission school under the auspices of the well-named missionary Mrs. Mary [or Maria] True, where she was famous for smoking a pipe in her office. A younger, Christian teacher said “Oh, smoking is bad, Mrs. Yajima,” to which Kajiko replied “For you young people, yes. Not for me.” In 1880 she became principal at Sakurai Girls’ School, founded by the young educationalist Sakurai Chika, remaining in that position through the merger of the two schools to form the Presbyterian Girls’ School in 1896. One of her students at Sakurai Girls, a rude young lady called Yamada Tsuneko or O-Tsun-chan to her friends, was not pleased when the youthful Chika was replaced by dour middle-aged Kajiko. “My dear, let us be good friends,” Kajiko coaxed. “Not interested, you’re not pretty like Mrs. Sakurai,” Tsuneko retorted. To be addressed here much later according to her birth year, she was later to marry Edward Gauntlett (the first official marriage of a Japanese woman and a Westerner, not counting instances like Cho-Cho San’s), become a teacher at her alma mater, and serve there and elsewhere as Kajiko’s right hand.

Kajiko herself eventually became a Christian as well (the records do not tell us whether she quit smoking). Her schools had no codified rules: “You have the Bible, so govern yourselves,” she told her students. Influenced by Mary Greenleaf Leavitt’s lectures, in 1886 she formed the first Japanese branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (the 東京夫人矯風会 or Tokyo Women’s Association for Reforming Customs) and became its chair. Their principles were (and remain, as the Japan Christian Women’s Organization) against drinking, smoking, and prostitution, and in favor of women’s rights, monogamy, gender equality, and peace. She met Frances Willard of the WCTU in Japan the following year, and continued working in this field throughout her life, attending the Boston WCTU Conference in 1906 and the London conference in 1920; in 1921, aged 89, she visited Manchuria and Korea and went to Washington, DC to present President Warren Harding with a “300-Foot Peace Plan” signed by Japanese women. Tsuneko Gauntlett accompanied her, did her hair and makeup, and taught her a speech in English to give as they lay in their bunk beds on the boat. Kajiko died in Tokyo at the age of 93.

Her sister Hisako’s younger son, the writer Tokutomi Roka, felt the need to complain in print after her death about Kajiko’s secrecy regarding her children (three from her marriage in Kumamoto, one in Tokyo), perhaps peeved that in life she had told him flatly “You have no way to understand how I feel.”

Sources
Mori 1996, Nakae, Shimamoto, Tanaka
https://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/e/datas/6039/ (various photos of Kajiko)